“Your LLM-assisted scientific breakthrough probably isn’t real” by eggsyntax

Summary

An increasing number of people in recent months have believed that they've made an important and novel scientific breakthrough, which they've developed in collaboration with an LLM, when they actually haven't. If you believe that you have made such a breakthrough, please consider that you might be mistaken! Many more people have been fooled than have come up with actual breakthroughs, so the smart next step is to do some sanity-checking even if you're confident that yours is real. New ideas in science turn out to be wrong most of the time, so you should be pretty skeptical of your own ideas and subject them to the reality-checking I describe below.

Context

This is intended as a companion piece to 'So You Think You've Awoken ChatGPT'[1]. That post describes the related but different phenomenon of LLMs giving people the impression that they've suddenly attained consciousness.

Your situation

If [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) Summary

(00:49) Context

(01:04) Your situation

(02:41) How to reality-check your breakthrough

(03:16) Step 1

(05:55) Step 2

(07:40) Step 3

(08:54) What to do if the reality-check fails

(10:13) Could this document be more helpful?

(10:31) More information

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

September 2nd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rarcxjGp47dcHftCP/your-llm-assisted-scientific-breakthrough-probably-isn-t

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.